Gulfstream

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6165-2003Oct23.html Loving Gary Larson box set review (US$135!). 09:34

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/celery.asp Yes! Celery really does require more calories to eat than it has in it. (Cecil Adams says the energy required to warm up ice-cold cold beer does not, unfortunately, exceed the calories in it.) 11:44

http://www.dazereader.com/001921.htm Extracts from a few different articles on internet porn and how it might (or might not) be changing men’s perceptions of sex and women. 14:30

http://www.authorsguild.org/news/amazon_launches_full.htm The Authors Guild (what, no apostrophe?) doesn’t like Amazon’s full text search.

“Whether your works should be in the program is hard to say. This program will likely prove to be useful in promoting certain titles. Midlist and backlist books that are receiving little attention, for example, may benefit from additional exposure in searches. For other titles, the program may erode sales. Most reference books would be at clear risk in such a database. So would many (if not most) travel books and cookbooks. Most fiction titles are not likely to be greatly threatened.”

(The Guild’s argument that, with effort, you can read most of the book without paying for it needs to be refined: this is true of books as well, which can be borrowed, photocopied, transcribed, thumbed through in bookshops, and so on.)

This might be a case in which the public’s interests are aligned with those of publishers and retailers, but not with those of the author. (c.f. digital music, where the prevailing opinion seems to be that the interests of the public and musicians (and possibly retailers) are aligned, and in opposition to those of the publisher.)

(The Authors Guild has previously urged members to not link to Amazon because Amazon sold second hand books; a subsequent clarification maintained that they have nothing in principle against the selling of second-hand books, only with systems that make buying them really easy to do…) 12:48

http://www.slate.com/id/2090303/ Obscure Economic Indicators: the Baltic Dry Index measures the cost of shipping raw materials, which makes it a good indicator of “economic growth and production.”

“After all, it doesn’t deal with container ships carrying finished goods. It deals with the precursors to production: bulk carriers carrying building materials, cement, grain, coal, and iron. Unlike stock and bond markets, the BDI ‘is totally devoid of speculative content,’ says Howard Simons, an economist and columnist at TheStreet.com. People don’t book freighters unless they have cargo to move.” 12:18

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60890,00.html Seems like one of the reasons why some TVs shows aren’t available on DVD is that it’s difficult to acquire the rights to the music. (And other TV shows released on DVD have different music.) 17:34

http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-
2317,00.html It’s called the “Tiananmen Square massacre,” but did anyone actually die there? There’s astonishingly little evidence that anyone did. (Responses are unfortunately a little out of sequence.) 13:55

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031027ta_talk_paumgarten New York is replacing WALK/DON’T WALK signs with signs that display either a large white figure in mid-stride or a large orange hand. (Paumgarten snidely describes this as the “Zurichification of our street corners.”)

The hand has always seemed to me a little disproportionate in comparison to the walking man; here we have beautifully-proportioned green walking men and red standing men. (I was once irritated when someone complained that they’re all men, partly because I couldn’t defend the practice…) 11:01

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16733 The use and development of weapons of war is shaped and influenced as much by the glory they confer as their actual (or potential) efficacy. Examples given: lancing foot soldiers from horseback, hunting U-boats (instead of escorting conveys), strategic bombing in daylight without fighter escort, national missile defense.

(Note also the huge list of “reviewed” books—it’s basically a bibliography…) 10:19

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ What the 191 members of the United Nations have “pledged to do” “by the year 2015.” A good list. Specifically environmental goals (e.g. taking measures to prevent global warming) are not included—perhaps because they were too controversial, but also, possibly, because they don’t score very highly on the cost/benefit equation.

(The much longer Millennium Declaration, I now notice, does include some environmental aims, such as ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.) 09:30

http://www.iht.com/articles/113390.html The Japanese love affair with French fashion (and in particular, A.P.C.). A.P.C. is one of my favourite retailers; I’ve always wondered how they could afford to exist since discovering that their (I supposed) flagship store, in Paris, was about the size of a basketball court. (The store in New York is about the same size.) As it turns out, they have about five in Japan; I guess they do most of their business there. Still, one does wonder how a fashion retailer can afford to produce lavish catalogs, etc. on the back of about 10 stores world-wide. 15:38

http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/10/2003101501c.htm “Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations?” 14:46

http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html According to Mother Teresa, abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace today”: “Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today.” (She says almost exactly the same thing at two other points in her speech.)

Her lecture also contains a baffling story: she once took rice to a starving Hindu family; instead of eating it all themselves, they shared it with their starving Muslim neighbours. Mother Teresa approved, commenting: “I didn’t bring more rice that evening because I wanted them to enjoy the joy of sharing.” How thoughtful. In Mother Teresa’s world, it seems, starving families prefer “the joy of sharing” to “more food.”

(Via Christopher Hitchens, who says she was not a friend of the poor, she was a friend of poverty.) 11:58

http://www.egmmag.com/article2/0,4364,1338730,00.asp Kids review classic computer games. 17:40

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1838_307/105367410/
print.jhtml Haruki Murakami, “Birthday Girl.” (Also: “All God’s Children Can Dance,” “Blind Willow, Sleeping Girl.”) 17:26

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1838_307/105367407/
print.jhtml The parallels between environmentalists (particularly radical environmentalists) and the religious (particularly early Christians). (Pole sitting, asceticism, belief in and fear of things that can’t be measured, etc.) 17:09

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1838_307/105367404/
print.jhtml “From emails exchanged last year between David Armstrong, a former English teacher, and employees of The Coca-Cola Company.” 17:07

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@138.kJREb1e7JrJ.4@.685e9480/
0 The “Barefoot Doctor”—a proponent of alternative medicine, apparently—answers hostile readers’ questions… 16:42

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus_pr.html Linus Torvalds interview. 13:09

http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/2003-10-14/ 17:03

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031020fa_fact6 “If directors really wanted authenticity, gunfights would be short and lethal and a lot of guys would fire without looking. A person might not even know he’s been hit until after the fight is over.” 16:16

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/17280617.html Cute personal ad. (Mouse over the “elements.”) 12:09

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/25/business/media/25ADCO.html “Marketers Turn Monks Into Product Pitchmen.” 11:06

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089569/ Savvy Michael Kinsley piece on Clark, the nature of politics, and “youthful political swoons.” 18:01

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/13/pf/dangerousjobs/ “Alaskan pilots have a one in eight chance of dying during a 30-year career…” (What’s the chance of a waiter dying through passive smoking?) 10:47

http://www.pizzamarketplace.com/news_story.htm?i=17058 Small-business marketing: how to sell pizza. 15:03

http://www.nteu.org.au/campaigns/higheredatrisk/strikemotion “NTEU National Council rejects the university industrial relations package announced on September 22nd … The package is ideologically driven and will promote confrontation …” I’m guessing the package itself is bad news, but what’s wrong with it being “ideologically driven”? Why shouldn’t ideology guide policy? 17:57

http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,1059068,00.html I’m not surprised the Vatican doesn’t like condoms; I am surprised their argument is that condoms are ineffective. (And not just ineffective because they come off, break, etc., but ineffective because the AIDS virus can pass through latex.)

Why isn’t it acceptable for the Church to say yes, people will die because of this policy, but to not use condoms is God’s wish? Is it these days unacceptable for monotheists to do something they’d rather not do because God wills it? (e.g. sacrifice your son on a mountain, fly a plane into buildings.) 17:32

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031013fa_fact Suicide, and the Golden Gate Bridge. “Several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge.”

(The four-foot rail. The article doesn’t mention it, but there are also signs on the bridge giving a number to call if you “need help,” or similar.) 13:07

http://www.bullymag.com/9.20.03/spiers-092003.asp Someone else dislikes Elizabeth Spiers and gawker.com. This June piece is more pointed: “Her self-defense is her own shallowness, and gives her motivation as ‘invitations to better parties.’ The most cynical shallowness is the kind that announces itself as ‘honesty.’”

(The other problem with Spiers’s Gawker is that it is (was?—there’s a new editor now) really poorly written (comparison).) 11:16

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089476/ Upcoming Supreme Court cases. This is worth it just for the line: “In the mid-1950s, Congress responded to the villainous spread of ‘godless communism’ by building more nuclear bombs to protect our shores and by adding the phrase ‘under God’ to the pledge to protect our souls.” 16:43

http://www.guybourdin.org/gallery/ Oh, wow! Wonderful photographs by Guy Bourdin. (Got here via the a page documenting some suspicious similarities between his photographs and Madonna’s video for “Hollywood.”) 19:14

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?031006crbo_books1 Rather nice rant about Microsoft Word embedded in this Louis Menand piece about writing, citations, and style guides.

(Which reminds me: what’s the right way to nest <cite> and <a> tags? <cite><a href="…">The New Yorker</a></cite> or <a href="…"><cite>The New Yorker</cite></a>?) 18:39

http://kcrw.org/show/mb RealAudio archive of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.

For some reason Nic Harcourt’s guests do really good, interesting covers when they appear on KCRW. A few years ago, Travis did their famous cover of Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” (starts at 27:20), and more recently Ben Lee did Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” (13:15) and Dido did James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” (25:30). (The audio quality of the newer shows is pretty good, too.) 18:05

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089163/ Michael Kinsley: In defense of hypothetical questions. (It’s not valid to dismiss a question as hypothetical.) 09:26